Feedforward, -backward,and neutral transparency measures for Grade 1 and Grade 2 Greek readers

In the present study, orthographic metrics for Greek children’s Grade 1 and Grade 2 reading materials were presented. Data for five transparency metrics—three of which being neither feedforward nor feedbackward— were presented and offered for use in the research of children’s reading and spelling acquisition. The analysis demonstrated the complex relationships between metrics and compared the results with those obtained for the English language. The structure of these metrics from a variety of corpus sizes was investigated, and we concluded that large corpus sizes do not necessarily make a substantial contribution to the value of such metrics when compared with smaller samples.     

Jumping to conclusions: A network model predicts schizophrenic patients’ performance on a probabilistic reasoning task

This article extends computational models of schizophrenia that focus on the negative aspects of this syndrome to behavioral biases that are associated with a positive symptom of schizophrenia, namely delusions. The phenomenon studied is the “jump-to-conclusions” style of reasoning that is characterized by delusional patients—in comparison with controls—whereby they make less-informed decisions when an option to collect more decision-specific information is available. Simulations show that these differences can be mimicked by modulating the gain parameter—associated with variations in dopamine level—in a simple network model.     

Construction area (no hard hat required)

A variety of relations widely invoked by philosophers—composition, constitution, realization, micro-basing, emergence, and many others—are species of what I call ‘building relations’. I argue that they are conceptually intertwined, articulate what it takes for a relation to count as a building relation, and argue that—contra appearances—it is an open possibility that these relations are all determinates of a common determinable, or even that there is really only one building relation.     

The Expert Snare as an Influence Tactic: Surf,Turf, and Ballroom Demonstrations of Some Compliance Consequences of Being Altercast as an Expert

Two experiments provide evidence for a newly discovered influence tactic termed the expert snare. In the expert snare, alter—the target of influence—is cast into the role of “expert.” In that role, alter attempts to maintain status by putting on the trappings of expertise, avoiding embarrassing disclosures, and accepting absurd proposals deemed necessary to uphold the role. Surfers, Frisbee players, and recreational dancers were altercast as experts in their respective domains. Relative to controls, such “experts” were more likely to support absurd proposals within their domain of expertise such as requiring surfboard bellies to be painted yellow with purple polka dots and students to take an orientation course on the non-existent activities of Tanzimat Frisbee and root dancing.     

Task-irrelevant visual motion and flicker attenuate the attentional blink

Our reduced ability to correctly report two sequentially presented targets is seen in the robust effect known as the attentional blink (AB; Raymond, Shapiro, & Arnell, 1992). One recent report (Olivers & Nieuwenhuis, 2005) strikingly reveals the AB to be virtually abolished when non-task-demanding music occurs in the background. The authors suggest that a diffuse attentional state is the mediating factor. Here, we seek to broaden the finding’s generality by determining if task-irrelevant visual motion and flicker also attenuate the AB. In our experiments, the AB task was presented together with a background field of moving dots that could moveaway from ortoward the central AB task, or flicker. In the control condition, the dots remained static. The AB was attenuated—though to different degrees—in all experimental conditions, but not in the static condition. Our findings add to the generality of the previous conclusions, and we emphasize an account based on the overallocation of attention.     

The epistemological challenge to metanormative realism: how best to understand it,and how to cope with it

Metaethical—or, more generally, metanormative—realism faces a serious epistemological challenge. Realists owe us—very roughly speaking—an account of how it is that we can have epistemic access to the normative truths about which they are realists. This much is, it seems, uncontroversial among metaethicists, myself included. But this is as far as the agreement goes, for it is not clear—nor uncontroversial—how best to understand the challenge, what the best realist way of coping with it is, and how successful this attempt is. In this paper I try, first, to present the challenge in its strongest version, and second, to show how realists—indeed, robust realists—can cope with it. The strongest version of the challenge is, I argue, that of explaining the correlation between our normative beliefs and the independent normative truths. And I suggest an evolutionary explanation (of a pre-established harmony kind) as a way of solving it.     

I misremember it well: Why older adults are unreliable eyewitnesses

We used the eyewitness suggestibility paradigm to investigate the hypothesis that cognitive aging is associated with an increase in misrecollections—confidently held but false memories of past events. When younger and older adults were matched on their overall memory for experienced events, both groups showed comparable rates of suggestibility errors in which they claimed to have seen events in a video that had only been suggested in a subsequent questionnaire. However, older adults were—alarmingly—most likely to commit suggestibility errors when they were most confident about the correctness of their response. By contrast, their younger, accuracy-matched counterparts were most likely to commit these errors when they were uncertain about the accuracy of their response. The elderly adults’ propensity to make high-confidence errors fits our misrecollection account.     

Norms of intentionality: norms that don’t guide

More than ever, it is in vogue to argue that no norms either play a role in or directly follow from the theory of mental content. In this paper, I present an intuitive theory of intentionality (including a theory of mental content) on which norms are constitutive of the intentional properties of attitude and content in order to show that this trend is misguided. Although this theory of intentionality—the teleological theory of intentional representation—does involve a commitment to representational norms, these norms are not problematic in the way critics have suggested they would be. In particular, these norms do not guide thinking by motivating intentional agents to (intentionally) accord with them; as a result, no obvious vicious regress threatens the theory. In the final section of this paper, I argue that accepting this teleological theory of intentionality need not commit one to thinking that intentionality is the product of natural selection.     

Mental states inside out: Switching costs for emotional and nonemotional sentences that differ in internal and external focus

Mental states—such as thinking, remembering, or feeling angry, happy, or dizzy—have a clear internal component. We feel a certain way when we are in these states. These internal experiences may be simulated when people understand conceptual references to mental states. However, mental states can also be described from an “external” perspective, for example when referring to “smiling.” In those cases, simulation of visible outside features may be more relevant for understanding. In a switching costs paradigm, we presented semantically unrelated sentences describing emotional and nonemotional mental states while manipulating their internal or external focus. The results show that switching costs occur when participants shift between sentences with an internal and an external focus. This suggests that different forms of simulation underlie understanding these sentences. In addition, these effects occurred for emotional and nonemotional mental states, suggesting that they are grounded in a similar way—through the process of simulation.     

Responsible authorship and peer review

In this article the basic principles of responsible authorship and peer review are surveyed, with special emphasis on (a) guidelines for refereeing archival journal articles and proposals; and (b) how these guidelines should be taken into account at all stages of writing. In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land. Now it behooves me, of course, to tell you what they’re missing. ... It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty—a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid—not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked—to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated. ... In summary, the idea is to try to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another. Richard P. Feynman, “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!” ¹ (pp. 310–311)     

Cuing effects of faces are dependent on handedness and visual field

Faces are unlike other visual objects we encounter, in that they alert us to potentially relevant social information. Both face processing and spatial attention are dominant in the right hemisphere of the human brain, with a stronger lateralization in right- than in left-handers. Here, we demonstrate behavioral evidence for an effect of handedness on performance in tasks using faces to direct attention. Nonpredictive, peripheral cues (faces or dots) directed exogenous attention to contrast-varying stimuli (Gabor patches)—a tilted target, a vertical distractor, or both; observers made orientation discriminations on the target stimuli. Whereas cuing with dots increased contrast sensitivity in both groups, cuing with faces increased contrast sensitivity in right- but not in left-handers, for whom opposite hemifield effects resulted in no net increase. Our results reveal that attention modulation by face cues critically depends on handedness and visual hemifield. These previously unreported interactions suggest that such lateralized systems may be functionally connected.     

Naturalizing the essential tension

Kuhn’s “essential tension” between conservative and innovative imperatives in enquiry has an empirical analogue—between the potential benefits of collectivization of enquiry and the social dynamic impediments to effective sharing of information and insights in collective settings. A range of empirical materials from social psychology and organization theory are considered which bear on the issue of balancing these opposing forces and an institution is described in which they are balanced in a way which is appropriate for collective knowledge production.     

Nothingness and the Human Umwelt

In the paper I argue that the great impact of empiricism on psychology and the enclosed dualist agenda traps psychological phenomena into subjectivism. By discussing the phenomena of nothingness in biological and cultural life it is argued that meaning must be considered as a phenomenon that represents both a fit and a misfit of the individual with the environment. By stressing the overall presence of nothingness phenomena it is argued how the reduced ontology of empiricism—and its blindness to relations and transformations out of which meaning grows—should be overcome. In human cultural life, transformations are constitutive and ongoing changes are being produced to make sure that continuity as well as discontinuity will happen. The analysis of especially one case—the removal of an Amish school after a shooting episode—serves to prove how meaning grows out of cultural processes as people produce their own conditions of life. From a cultural-ecological point of view, analyzing meaning at the level of individual phenomenology, hence, means analyzing the ‘total psychological situation’ (legacy of Kurt Lewin). This may for instance include analyzing how people live, what they consider important and worth preserving, what must be changed, what are their core values and how do institutional arrangements contribute to keeping up that which is valued or to changing that which is not, etc. Meaning may be viewed the lived-out experience—the domain of self-generativity in human life.     

Inconsistency in the A-Theory

This paper presents a new argument against A-theories of time. A-theorists hold that there is an objective now (present moment) and an objective flow of time, the latter constituted by the movement of the objective now through time. A-theorists therefore want to draw different pictures of reality—showing the objective now in different positions—depending upon the time at which the picture is drawn. In this paper it is argued that the times at which the different pictures are drawn may be taken to be normal times or hypertimes. If they are normal times then the A-theory is inconsistent, or else collapses to the B-theory—and appealing to primitive tense operators will not help A-theorists avoid this conclusion. If the times are hypertimes then the A-theory is consistent, but deeply problematic none the less.     

Existential loneliness and end-of-life care: A systematic review

Patients with a life-threatening illness can be confronted with various types of loneliness, one of which is existential loneliness (EL). Since the experience of EL is extremely disruptive, the issue of EL is relevant for the practice of end-of-life care. Still, the literature on EL has generated little discussion and empirical substantiation and has never been systematically reviewed. In order to systematically review the literature, we (1) identified the existential loneliness literature; (2) established an organising framework for the review; (3) conducted a conceptual analysis of existential loneliness; and (4) discussed its relevance for end-of-life care. We found that the EL concept is profoundly unclear. Distinguishing between three dimensions of EL—as a condition, as an experience, and as a process of inner growth—leads to some conceptual clarification. Analysis of these dimensions on the basis of their respective key notions—everpresent, feeling, defence; death, awareness, difficult communication; and inner growth, giving meaning, authenticity—further clarifies the concept. Although none of the key notions are unambiguous, they may function as a starting point for the development of care strategies on EL at the end of life.     

Musa Posseliana: Johannes Posselius the Elder (1528-91) and the Lutheran Greek Program

Abstract

In this article I examine one outcome of the programme for teaching Greek in Lutheran schools during the second half of the sixteenth century. Luther had insisted upon the teaching of Latin and Greek as a means to help ensure orthodoxy. Melanchthon had developed a curriculum in which the ancient languages formed the basis of Humanist education in the liberal arts. Johannes Posselius was a member of the first generation to study under this new curriculum. An examination of the texts he composed for the classroom shows his commitment to the active use of Greek. He presented Greek as a language suited to conversation and original composition, and modelled these uses in his own work. In his Greek poetic compositions, Posselius wrote for an elite audience, again demonstrating how Greek could contribute to contemporary literature.     

Controlling lexical contributions to the reading of pseudohomophones

Reynolds and Besner (2005) presented a computational account of six effects that emerge when readers are asked to pronounce pseudohomophones (nonwords—e.g., brane—that sound like words when pronounced). In the dual route cascaded (DRC) model of reading, they varied a parameter controlling the rate of inhibition from letter units to the orthographic lexicon to mimic strategic control over the extent of specific lexical processing. In this article, we provide an account in which the effects are simulated by varying the DRC’s reading-aloud criterion—a parameter that sets the minimal level of phonemic activation required to pronounce a letter string. We show that varying this parameter provides another means of controlling lexical contributions to reading aloud.     

From recognition to decisions: Extending and testing recognition-based models for multialternative inference

The recognition heuristic is a noncompensatory strategy for inferring which of two alternatives, one recognized and the other not, scores higher on a criterion. According to it, such inferences are based solely on recognition. We generalize this heuristic to tasks with multiple alternatives, proposing a model of how people identify the consideration sets from which they make their final decisions. In doing so, we address concerns about the heuristic’s adequacy as a model of behavior: Past experiments have led several authors to conclude that there is no evidence for a noncompensatory use of recognition but clear evidence that recognition is integrated with other information. Surprisingly, however, in no study was this competing hypothesis—the compensatory integration of recognition—formally specified as a computational model. In four studies, we specify five competing models, conducting eight model comparisons. In these model comparisons, the recognition heuristic emerges as the best predictor of people’s inferences.